Slice and dice with dates
PostedToday we released a new data type on our platform to give you more power and flexibility with your data: Dates.
Now you can send Mixpanel a date and we’ll let you manipulate your data. You can find this in the segmentation report.
Examples
- Last time a user logged in
- The date that a user signed up
- The date of a specific action: photo upload, tweet, etc.
Integration
Integration is very intuitive. All you have to do is pass a property with a date formed as: “YYYY-MM-DD” (2011-01-01). You can also give us up to the second granularity if you’d like: “2011-01-02 03:34:21.” We will automatically interpret data that looks like this as a date.
Keep in mind, that you should send us dates that are in UTC format if they have granularity beyond a day level. If you send us data on a day granularity then we’ll simply take that and not convert it to UTC as it would be ambiguous.
Would appreciate a little more transparency on what the purpose of the feature is. Does this date property override an event’s timestamp?
Hey Matt – no, this doesn’t override the timestamp. It’s just for data that is inherently a date, like signup date, last login, etc.
The goal is to be able to filter meaningfully on dates rather than treating them as a string, so you can do queries like “show me the ‘purchase’ event where signup > 2011-11-01″.